Alan Dillon (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister's support for and engagement with Mayo County Council. It is hugely important. We have a very good housing team in the local authority and I am working closely with that team. However, housing policy in Mayo has been dictated by financial interests rather than by the needs of the locality and that certainly needs to be reformed. We should pursue affordable housing initiatives not based on the risk or the cost but based on the needs of people who want home ownership. With social housing, councils get 100% reimbursement whereas the cost of affordable housing is met by the councils and they carry the risk. That is the danger here for local authorities; they want to implement a scheme but they want support from the Department. I thank the Minister for his engagement and look forward to working with him on this in the coming weeks.

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